Community Policing

2 Pages 456 Words

Within the inner cities and places known to certain people as “the hood,”there has always been an area of dislike when it came to law enforcement officials. The people that I grew up with and around have always had a certain level of intolerance when it came to the cop vehicles that rode the streets at night, and the officers that were seen during the day. It never mattered how much crime took place within those areas, because the trust for police officers was smaller than the trust held by the criminals within that area. My parents have often held a certain dislike for law enforcement, seeing them as a necessity for certain situations, but the overall reaction towards them has continued to be the same. Cops are simply not trusted within black neighborhoods. This topic brings about a host of questions. Why is that? What can be done? How can this lack of trust be changed, if it can be at all? And this leads me to my subject matter.
Within the course of our class, we have talked about a multiple of things that had to do with management within the Criminal Justice field. We have covered everything from courts, to lawyers, to management of prisons and jails. We have looked at how things are run at local, state and federal levels and the topics that most interested me were the ones on community relations and programs. Because I do have family members, friends, and peers alike, who hold law enforcement agents in such low regard, I decided focus my paper on policing black neighborhoods and how to establish a working relationship with those within that community. Since we were to focus on something that management would be a part of I felt that this was something that needed to be researched.
Looking back on the history of how things have been in some neighborhoods, it’s not difficult to understand why certain people have distrust for the system at large. Since the beginning of the whole civil rights struggle in the 60’s there has...